If you receive fresh cut flowers, here are some tips on making them last and look fabulous:
[This may be common knowledge or common sense, but I might as well share what I learned.]
If you’ve gotten a bouquet without a container, you’ll want to remove any leaves (or buds or flowers) on the stems that will be under water once you fill the vase. Otherwise, any submerged foliage will rot, smell like sewage, and become a breeding ground for bacteria that will kill your flowers.
If you get an arrangement in a shallow tray with the flowers stuck into a block of foam, you need to water the foam. Otherwise, it will quickly dry out (like a kitchen sponge) and the flowers will die.
Use cool water for longer-lasting blooms. Warm water makes flowers open faster.
Keep flowers away from heat sources. It dries them out and hastens their life cycle- and therefore, their demise.
Keep flowers away from direct sunlight. To be dramatic, imagine a hair dryer pointed at your bouquet. If direct sunlight hits the vase, imagine your flowers bathing in a vaseful of boiling water.
Every two to three days, change the water in your vase. Clean out the container. If you received a packet of flower food, add it to the fresh water.
Whenever you change the water, re-cut the flower stems. Cut at an angle (for more surface area to suck up water, and to allow the stems access to water (so a horizontal cut doesn’t sit directly against a flat vase bottom)), removing at least a half an inch (and cut at least a half inch above any rotted sections). Now that the stems are shorter, remove any leaves that are now under water.
You know the phrase ‘One bad apple spoils the bunch’? Well, they can spoil your flowers, too. Keep flowers away from fruit. Ripening fruit gives off ethylene gas, which accelerates the life cycle (and death) of flowers.
Remove wilting, decaying, and spent flowers, leaves, and stems from the arrangement. They also give off ethylene (and look ugly). I’ve seen people toss out arrangements when a few of the flowers first start dying. If you pull out only the individual flowers that are going bad, you can keep the rest of the flowers around longer- sometimes another week (or more).
The orange pollen from lilies stains, so be careful of brushing up against them. You probably don’t want to place a white tablecloth underneath the arrangement, either. To avoid dealing with the pollen, you can gently pick off the anther (the red part) from the filament (the little ‘stem’ that the red part sits on) when the flower first starts to open (before it has set out any pollen). If pollen does happen to get on any fabric, DON’T TOUCH IT! Cut a piece of tape and carefully stick the tape to the fabric (don’t press down) and then remove it. Keep doing this with a fresh length of tape for as long as the tape still picks up color. You might not get all the pollen off, but you’ll get most of it. If you were to touch it, the pollen would only smear, get smashed into the fibers, and create an even bigger mess than you started out with.
A number of myths swarm around the care of cut flowers, such as placing a penny in the vase (does nothing) and pouring 7Up into the water (sugar breeds bacteria). The best treatment is simply fresh water.
Most of all, no matter how long they last, no matter how well you do or don’t take care of them, enjoy your flowers!